Magento SEO: The Guide to Optimizing Magento 2 Websites

According to Online Marketing Gurus, 44% of people start online shopping from a search engine query. Meanwhile, Intergrowth reports that 75% of users don’t scroll further than the first page of search engines. And to get to the first page, search engine optimization of the website is necessary. In this post, we have gathered the best practices, extensions, and tools necessary for search engine optimization of your Magento store.

The Importance of SEO for Online Stores

SEO is the backbone of digital visibility, and for online stores, it’s vital to have a prime spot in the world’s most bustling digital marketplace. Let’s delve into the importance of SEO for online stores.

Driving Organic Traffic

At its core, SEO is about making waves in organic search results. You can develop a great website with a professional Magento agency, like Onilab, or spend a fortune on ads, but only a good SEO strategy can attract a steady stream of visitors without constantly burning a hole in your pocket.

Understanding Customer Behavior

SEO is more than just making search engines happy. It’s like having a heart-to-heart with your customers. When you focus on the right keywords, you’re kinda eavesdropping on what they want, need, and worry about.

Cost-Effective Marketing

With SEO, your online shop gets a secret weapon. Do it right, and the results can outshine and outlive those pricey ad campaigns.

Staying Ahead of the Curve

The Internet is jam-packed with competitors vying for the top spot. By pulling out all the stops with your SEO strategy, you ensure that your store remains a cut above the rest, always catching the customer’s eye first.

Boosting Conversion Rates

Top-notch SEO isn’t just about visibility; it’s about making the shopping experience a breeze. If folks find what they’re after without a fuss, they’re more likely to hit that “buy” button.

Reaping Long-Term Benefits

While those pay-per-click ads might give you a quick spotlight moment, their magic dims when you cut the budget. But SEO? It’s like a good investment; with a bit of regular love and attention, you’ll enjoy the perks long after the heavy lifting is done.

Key Factors of Magento 2 SEO

The three primary components of Magento SEO success are:

• Authority: Search Engines will give your website a higher ranking if they think it is reliable, secure, and beneficial to the community. In terms of authority, blog postings and affiliate links are particularly helpful.

• Relevance: Search Engines must have a clear understanding of the market, purpose, and philosophy behind your website. As a result, they may direct consumers to your website when they are searching for pertinent terms. Best techniques for this include proper keyword research, image and on-page content optimization.  

• User-friendliness: Naturally, you want the search engine bot to understand the structure of your website well enough to index it. In order for your consumer to have a seamless experience, you also need to ensure your website is quick and fluid. The UX and site performance have a significant impact on this element. 

Magento SEO Best Practices

Let’s further delve into each of the Magento SEO practices, shedding more light on their importance and detailing how they can be optimally utilized.

Keyword Research

The most essential SEO strategy for online stores is keyword research, and it is largely the same for Magento SEO. Each Magento SEO marketer should utilize keyword research tools to find relevant keywords, create a list of those keywords, and select a few popular pages to rank for those pages.

Beyond just identifying high-volume keywords, delve into the long-tail keywords that cater to more specific searches. These can often have a higher conversion rate because they cater to users who have a clear intent. Also, consider using local keywords if you cater to specific geographic areas.

After some time has passed, you may utilize Google Analytics or other pertinent technologies to determine whether your blog posts are effective or whether affiliates or websites bring in the most profit for your store. 

Title Tags and Meta Description Optimization 

On every significant page, create concise title tags and meta descriptions that are keyword-focused and appealing. Titles should be 30–60 characters long, and meta descriptions – 135-160 characters. SEO extensions may be able to save you the arduous task of creating metatags for hundreds of product pages. 

Ensure your title tags and meta descriptions also resonate with the user’s search intent. Including a call-to-action in your meta description can significantly uplift the click-through rate.

Screenshot taken on the official Google website

Generation of XML and HTML Sitemaps

An XML sitemap provides Search Engines with an overall structure of your eCommerce sites, indicating which URLs they should and shouldn’t index. An HTML sitemap, in its turn, makes this information easily available to users.

Despite the fact that Magento 2 does not allow HTML sitemaps, SEO plugins make it simple to create one. You may also quickly create an XML sitemap by going to Marketing > SEO & Search > Site Map. Click “Add Sitemap and fill in the blanks for the sitemap’s name and path.

Screenshot taken on the official Mageplaza website

Periodically revisit your sitemaps. As you add or remove products or categories, your sitemap should reflect these changes. This ensures that search engines always have an up-to-date view of your site’s structure. Go to Store > Configuration > Catalog > XML sitemap and change the scope value to default config to keep your sitemap updated. Enter the start time and frequency in accordance with your store’s operations.

Screenshot taken on the official Mageplaza website

Duplicate Content Prevention

Duplicate content can emerge from various corners. Product variations (like color or size), similar products listed under different categories, or even session-specific URLs can lead to content that’s very similar.

Search engines’ goal is to provide the most relevant content to users. When they encounter multiple identical versions of content, it becomes challenging to discern which one to rank. Consequently, your pages might compete against each other, diluting your SEO efforts. Search engines might also misjudge which version to index, leading to a suboptimal user experience.

Regularly using tools like Screaming Frog or SEMrush can help identify and manage duplicate content. This proactive approach ensures that your content remains unique, enhancing its SEO value.

Besides, it’s worth the effort to craft unique content. Not only does this stave off duplication issues, but it also provides a richer experience for your users, catering to their specific needs and queries.

Canonical Tags

The canonical tags instruct search engines which URL to index when there are two URLs that appear to be identical but have different contents. Product pages and category pages won’t have the canonical tag set by default in Magento 2. We should include self-referential canonical tags for category and product pages as they frequently have several URLs referring to them. 

To set canonical tags, go to Stores > Configuration > Catalog > Search Engine Optimization. Set the fields according to your requirements and press ‘Save Config.’

Screenshot taken on the official Mageplaza website

Robots.txt

Search engine URL’s crawling can be restricted via robots.txt. This is a file used by websites to communicate with web crawlers and other web robots. Basically, robots.txt instructs search engines not to crawl certain URLs. Think about using the robots.txt file to block login pages, internal search pages, facet navigation, and others.

The procedures below will enable you to manage the robots.txt using Magento:

• Go to Content > Design > Configuration
• To make a modification, choose the Store View and click Edit.
• Add your robots.txt commands in the Edit custom instruction of the robots.txt File field.

Taking Care of URLs

The greatest URLs are keyword-focused, descriptive, brief, and consistent. Additionally, special characters should be eliminated, and hyphens should be used in place of spaces. 

You need to take care of redirections. A 301 redirect signals to both search engines and users that a page was permanently moved to a new location or URL. A 302 redirect signals a temporary move. This means the page has been moved to a new location for now, but it’s only for a short period, and the content will eventually return to its original location.

Mind that 302 redirects are known to negatively affect link equity. In order to maintain a healthy link structure, switch to 301 redirects. Here’s how to do it:

• Go to Stores > Configuration > Web;
• In the Url Options menu, change Auto-redirect to Base URL to Yes (301 Moved Permanently).

Screenshot taken on the official Mageplaza website

Image Optimization

Products’ images shouldn’t go above the 500kb limit in order to keep a smooth speed. As a result, if your photos are heavy, you should compress them using Photoshop or other online tools before uploading them. Additionally, it is beneficial to give the pictures concise, descriptive labels and alt title tags. Google also uses the titles of images and the alt title tags for ranking web pages. 

Speeding up the Store

It’s necessary to make sure your Magento online store is quick since page speed affects how Google ranks pages. Beyond SEO, a quicker website helps you to provide a better customer experience, and several studies have demonstrated a link between a quick-loading website and increased conversion rates.

Measure your baseline first. Check your loading speed with a program like Google PageSpeed Insights. Improve your website load times by adhering to the suggestions, like:

• Updating Magento 2 to the latest version;
• Finding a suitable hosting;
• Removing plugins;
• Optimizing CSS files;
• Optimizing JavaScript;
• Arranging Magento indexers;
• Improving Caching;
• Etc.

Also, since 61% of Google searches are done via mobile devices, it’s vital to use Google’s mobile test tool to ensure that your website functions properly on mobile devices.

Magento 2 SEO Extensions

Although the scope of search optimization work may seem daunting, there are various tools and Magento 2 extensions that may help. Let’s have a look at some of them.

Magento 2 SEO Extension by BSS

It is a complete bundle that includes all the settings you need to improve your SEO ranking. And to ensure continuous SEO performance, they give away a free SEO audit service to consumers who purchase this tool. Here are the key advantages of the extension:

• Increases the functionality of Magento 2’s rich snippets to provide additional product details on search engine results pages, category snippets, search boxes, and social media sharing

• Creates an HTML sitemap with goods, categories, CMS pages, and other connections for a well-structured website layout that makes it easier for users to locate what they’re looking for.

• Breadcrumbs functionality is expanded to make user navigating easier, which reduces website bounce rates.

Magento 2 SEO Extension by Mageplaza

With this Magento 2 SEO extension, you might be able to boost your site’s ranks and observe a notable rise in organic traffic. A few other features include:

• Preventing duplicate content issues to reduce the risk of decreased website traffic and detrimental SEO repercussions;

• Automatic addition of organized schema without setup to your online store, assisting search engines in properly displaying your pages;

• SEO reports are provided for the most common issues, such as missing metadata or 404 error pages, to improve the performance of Magento-based businesses;
  
• XML and HTML sitemap to aid search engines in understanding the setup and hierarchy of the information on your website. This will also make it simpler for users to explore and discover what they need, reducing bounce rates.

Magento 2 SEO Extension by FME Extensions

The Magento 2 SEO Extension is a comprehensive SEO toolbox for Magento 2 businesses that drastically reduces the burden and expense of search engine optimization for your online advertising campaigns. The eight powerful tools automate SEO and raise your site’s SERP ranking. Its capabilities include:

• Advanced meta templates for dynamically creating page and post titles and descriptions;
  
• Reducing duplicate pages by using canonical tags to point crawlers to the source;
  
• Crosslinks for implementing the hundreds of internal links to the product pages;
  
• The rich snippet tool to provide the necessary data for displaying Google search results.

SEO Toolkit by Amasty

With Amasty’s SEO toolbox, improving your SEO gets much easier. One-click SEO analysis, adding rich snippets, pagination, redirecting, and other sophisticated tools are a few of the available options. Amasty is a great choice due to its rich functionality:

• One-click SEO analysis for the page and blog posts;

• The ability to provide custom redirects and redirects to different shop views;

• Users may collaborate to develop templates and original meta descriptions for pages and categories using the Yoast plugin;

• Adding a snippet to the listing to display extra product details (ratings, reviews, stocks);

• Using automated crosslinks and smart pagination to prevent duplicate content and broken pages;

SEO Suite Ultimate by Mageworx

It’s a well-liked SEO extension that has gotten positive reviews from users. It includes a ton of strong capabilities that may address any SEO issues your site may be having. From concerns with duplicate content, a lack of an HTML sitemap, 404 pages, and page navigation, this plugin has you covered. Here are some other advantages:

• Sets up permanent (301) or temporary (302) redirects, links all of your online store’s key sites, and optimizes enormous volumes of data;

• Utilize sophisticated rich snippets to offer more details about your items or categories, such as pricing, reviews, and availability;

• Automate link creation by establishing a connection between credible outside sources and pertinent links on your website for simpler tracking from a single grid;
  
• Delivers the proper content to the audience by using hreflang tags to let Google know about the alternate and primary versions of your website’s pages.

Advanced SEO Suite by Mirasvit

By adding rich snippets, breadcrumbs, and business information straight to search results, the tool offers features to help you stand out to clients. Other qualities include:

• Defining metacontent patterns to automatically fill metadata across a website and increase click-through rates for search results;

• Making 301, 302, or 307 redirects for website URLs to keep SEO value while carrying out site changes without affecting its search engine position;

• A built-in crawler that may provide reports and enhance website performance by scanning pages for SEO issues, including robot meta headers, canonical URLs, picture alt tags, and other elements that affect website ranking.

Final Word

One important thing you need to understand here is that SEO is not a one-time task. It demands constant attention. As search engine algorithms change, so should your strategies. Regularly check for any broken links, monitor 404 errors, and always be on the lookout for opportunities to enhance on-page SEO.

In summary, mastering SEO on Magento requires a holistic approach, marrying technical know-how with a keen understanding of user behavior. By keeping these best practices in mind and continually iterating based on insights, you can ensure that your Magento store isn’t just visible but also offers an unparalleled shopping experience.